NF had its peak right before the big flix-gate (lol) when they upped the price, removed streaming and changed plans on everyone.

at that point, I dropped them and never looked back.

vpn is $10 or less. torrents are free. there are NO ADS in torrents. no drm, and good compression yet still watchable.

I have not found a reason to resume paying for content. if an enlightened company gives me a good reason, I could consider it. but I'm not interested in resuming netflix and now that they are starting to SHOW the dark side of their corp mentality, yeah, they are a done-deal and I predict a decline in their customer levels over time.

what? "the romans, they go to the house??"

I use this, for the pi:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

get a 12v SLA battery (as you'd find in a computer UPS box) and that sits on one set of leads. your 14-18v filtered dc goes into thee main non-battery input, and you get one 'logic OR' output.

now, its either the battery voltage (12) or the input module voltage (could be 18v). so, I then pass that ups module output into a dc/dc to bring it down to a clean and reliable 5v for the pi:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

this ensures you always always get 5v into the pi, even if you lose mains power. it can all be built into a single box, too, even the 12v battery.

just fyi. (I built all this and its been working well for months, so far)

https://farm9.staticflickr.com...

HTH

I recently had 2 interviews: one at HP and one at ebay.

both were 'rows and rows of desks in an OO grid'. made me sick to see how dehumanizing it was. no, I did not get any offers from either of those 2 places. maybe it was a good thing.

I saw next to no personal stuff on peoples' desks, there. I tend to bring things in from home (sometimes even computers or networking boxes that I need for a short term 'lab') but I would not feel ok doing that when no desk actually belongs to you, you come in, grab one of the 'open desks' and then use someone's grubby keyboard, probably still with cold and flu virus on the keys. not enough lockers (the concept of a locker at work also turns me off; as our desks USED to be lockers in their own right; stable ones we could always use and count on) and no security so I would not feel good about leaving my stuff there.

there really seems to be a unified effort to dehumanize employees. also to reduce their pay, make them compete with foreigners (who live 6 or 12 to a house that only has 3 bedrooms), keep their payscales at an all-time low and fire you when your project is done.

we truly are slipping back to the bad old days of millworkers in sweatshops. unions don't exist for hw/sw guys (generally) and there are no signs of anything coming back to help balance the power again.

one thing is for sure: each time I see an OO plan, I throw up a little and I weep for us all, in our collective losses. HR keeps telling us 'the kids love it!' but even when I talk to 20somethings they really don't love this OO idea either.

this actually sounds pretty good to me!

not sure its enough to make me learn french. also not sure its enough to make me want to move there and have to inhale next to frenchmen. I'll have to give it some more thought.

seriously, the US is the exact opposite. its almost like there is a celebration on how far you can depress US workers' wages, rights and personal time off. we have some of the least amount of time off in the world; probably worst in the developed world. corporations are 'people' (how absurd!) and they are always given the upper hand. we even have companies forcing you (since you have no choice) to 'agree' to binding arbitration, which is a bought and paid for NON-court that gets to judge your grievance against a company. you don't even get what's left of US justice; you get what a corporation thinks you deserve.

the US is fucked. we are burning thru our advantages - what we once had, that is. I wish we had a bit more of france's views toward workers and fairness. something in the middle would be great, you know! (dreaming on; know it won't happen).

100%. this is why I refuse to install 'apps' and I really use my smartphone to just check email, run gps and sometimes use voice to make calls. most of a smart phone is wasted on me since I'm not a typical teen or 20someething who 'buys into' the whole shebang, lack of privacy and all.

android is not really trustable, carriers are a joke for trust, app writers tend to abuse their position and write crap or malicious code and the whole thing is a steaming pile of shit.

the smart phone thing had a lot of potential but I see that we have ruined this medium and device just like the 'business guys' have totally ruined the web and the internet as a whole.

now, I had nothing against uber before hearing this; but now, I won't be caught dead inside one of their cars, now. this 'war on your customers' is nothing I care to help fund or support!

uber can go fuck off. they don't exist to me, given this stance of theirs.

(and now I'm starting to have 2nd thoughts about having ANY 'contacts' in my contact list. again, phones cannot be trusted and apps, even less. best way to not have your friends spammed is, I guess, just to NOT even populate the contact list! seriously - might just return to flip phones and call it a century..)

you mean, like, "doing the spyful?"

I bet it happens more than we want to admit.

Nothing brings a species together like breaking the moon into lots of tiny bits and dropping them on the planet we live on.

"Blessed are the chee-
Oh shit!
Run for your lives!!"

no one ever said 'min wage' for h1b.

but its minimum in RELATIVE terms because there's no reason to have to pay local salary rates if you don't have to.

maybe its only 10k less or 5k less but if the workforce is over 50% indian (bay area: its more like 80% or more; wish I was kidding) and a huge percent of those are h1b's, then it adds up.

there are pay windows or ranges and every h1b salary is on the low end of the range. because, "they can" and they do get away with it.

the indentured servant is 100% true; once you are onboard, you are abused, overworked and treated like shit. they know that you are stuck there. they brought you in FOR that reason, mostly.

440hz sounds like a better idea to me, though.

in a nutshell, the only diff between republicans and democrats, these days, is the ultra religion that the republicans insist that we all have to endure.

other than that, both fellate big (and even small) business, both hate the individual, both hate freedom and liberty, both love cheap labor and could care less about the locals being able to AFFORD things, both are owned by military and hollywood, both are parties of the rich and well-to-do.

the ONLY difference is in religion. I would expect the same loss of freedom from both sides; but with the D's its a little bit less in-your-face when it comes to the US going in the direction of a theocracy.

kang or kodos, is mostly does not matter anymore. we're screwed no matter what.

(oh, and australia, the UK and a lot of the west is similarly screwed. so its not just the US; its a new sickness that is overtaking the previously-free world).

the CURRENT system is designed (patched) to disallow major changes. so, no peaceful solution exists to reform us.

you want violence? I'm ok with that, if its othe only way to fix things, but I'm not excited about living thru it. no sane person is.

but I repeat, peaceful solutions won't work when the game is all stacked against reform and the power broker club circles the wagons and protects themselves against ANY real change.

show me one government that has gone this bad and self-corrected without a revolution. name one.

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

obama probably had his heart in the right place when he started, but clearly he's not the same person who conned us into voting him in office. everything he said was a lie (everything that mattered or pertained to our privacy, true security and loss of rights during the 'bushing down' of america.

regardless of what he was like beforehand, he's now useless and has been taken over by corruption and power ;(

I submit that there is not a single human being, alive or dead, that can stay true to their promise of integrity AND be in the highest power office in the world. its not possible, its not do-able and we should stop expecting it. abs power corrupts absolutely, we all know this and we can see it, first-hand.

we have 2 problems and I don't see either one being fixable. first is what I just listed - that no one can be in that office and not be corrupted in short order; and the other problem is that people are being lied to, they are not being told the truth and they are brainwashed from early youth to 'fight on teams' and to pick a team and fight for them. this 'great distraction' keeps us chattering and Our Masters(tm) love that we are kept distracted this way. we generally don't believe that abs power corrupts absolutely, we refuse to believe 'our guy' could be taken over like that and so we continue to play tribal us-vs-them games.

the people are kept stupid, the leaders enrich themselves at our expensve and there is no fix in sight.

welcome to planet earth. this is a form of hell, here, not heaven. oh, and there is no heaven, that's another lie told to keep you in-line and behaved.

these days, the IoT term has been hijacked to mean 'we mine your personal info along with smart sensors we convince you to buy and install inside your private LAN.'

that's really a bad idea, of course. I'm very into IoT things right now, myself, but NOT cloud-based shit! not for me! MY iot stuff is about device to device and device to small server, ALL staying local and nothing going across to a WAN. nrf24l01, xbee, even esp8266 - all neat wireless protocols. but all meant to stay local, too.

if your iot solution leaks info, you picked some cloud-based thing. DONT DO THAT!

iot != cloud

likely its the magic 32k number, which happens to be the size of the atmega 328 (arduino classic) chip!

still, 32k is too large for many sensors. attiny chips are now in the 8k range and even that is asking a lot. 4k used to be more typical.

android? HAHAHAHAH! google, you are teh funny. the security nightmare and complexity of android for IoT sensors? wow, I needed a good laugh today.